


First Steps

by CCNSurvivor



Series: Hecate Prompts [3]
Category: The Worst Witch (TV 2017)
Genre: Drabble, F/F, Tumblr Prompt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-26
Updated: 2018-06-26
Packaged: 2019-05-29 00:32:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 630
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15061145
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CCNSurvivor/pseuds/CCNSurvivor
Summary: Written for the "Please...I need you" prompt.





	First Steps

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hiccuphardbroom](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=hiccuphardbroom).



Her relationship with Pippa has never been straight-forward. Right from the start it’s been filled with highs and lows, bumps and misunderstandings that have left them both feeling bruised and sore. But there’s never been a dead end, not for Hecate anyhow who is far more accustomed to fleeing than fighting. Yet she is facing one now.

They’ve been steering towards it so steadily – across missed mirror calls, misjudged albeit well-intended acts of valour and misconceptions around each other’s preferred kind of magic – that Hecate fails to understand how it can still cut her so deeply. But here they are nonetheless and it’s Pippa who’s poised to flee, and she doesn’t know how to stop her. Panic is thrumming its angry beat against her ribcage, tilting her stomach as though she’s free-falling. And maybe she is, because without Pippa, without her spontaneous, nagging mirror calls, without those easy smiles and freely given hugs, it feels as though there is a dark, gaping chasm opening up before her.

But she doesn’t know how to translate these thoughts into words, can only come up with trite sentiments she isn’t certain will convey the right gravitas. But she knows that when she looks into Pippa’s brown eyes and finds only sadness and hurt that there’s been one barb too many.

“I’m sorry, Hecate, sorry that after all these years you can only offer silence.”

It’s decidedly foreign, as though she’s watching herself through someone else’s eyes remain rigid and frightened. But the pain in her chest is still sharp and acute, not at all numbed by the shock that’s otherwise clouding her senses.

Pippa presses her lips together and huffs out a quiet sigh that whispers of goodbye. She doesn’t need to say the words because already her hands are twisting and she’s spinning and dissolving and-

“Please…I need you.”

Fingers solidify until they are intertwined with her own that reached so desperately into thin air. Brown eyes are studying her with badly concealed hope.

“Hecate?”

She has never understood how her name on Pippa’s lips can induce flutters that border on giddiness. She has never understood how on Pippa’s lips she sounds soft and admirable. But suddenly she finds she wants to understand, wants to make sense of the gestures and touches that ghost like unspoken words between them.

“I need you, Pippa,” she repeats, her voice a fragile thing that quivers with the deep affection she has always felt. “But I’m not good at…this.” She can feel her face contort into a grimace of awkwardness. With her free hand, she gestures through the air. “At…at expressing or showing…But I need you.”

“Oh, my dear Hecate, don’t you think I know that?” Her bottom lip trembles when Pippa extracts her hand, then steadies when she moves it to her face, knuckles caressing her cheek. “All I need is to feel that you want me by your side, that you do not look at me as some embarrassing, frivolous thing.”

“I never have,” she starts to protest, then confesses under the challenge of Pippa’s raised eyebrow, “well, sometimes, but you have to admit we tend to view certain issues rather differently. You’d be lying if you claimed you have never called me old-fashioned or set in my ways before.”

Her smile is enough to chase away the final lingering fear in her heart, and Hecate can feel her own eyes glisten with gentle amusement.

“I need you too, Hecate. I always have.”

There’s more to her words than letters and syllables, a deeper meaning that she cannot yet grasp. Then Pippa is in her arms and holding her as though she’s worth protecting, and for the first time in her life she begins to wonder if maybe she is.


End file.
